But hereās the thing about tone: in many cases, it does matter. And though I was often politically and personally in agreement with our commenters, their over-the-top rhetoric could be alienating to me. I worried that this sort of rhetoric might offend new readers, and that it would be harmful to the new dialogue around gender politics that we were trying to influence and bring into the mainstream. Was there such a thing as ātoo muchā anger? If so, who was I to determine what ātoo muchā is? I felt torn, so I kept these questions mostly to myself.ā¦
The majority of our commenters were very good. Smart, observant, well-read, vibrant, and dizzyingly funny, they added context and nuance to the stories we published and pressed us to do better. Within a year of Jezebelās launch, they even attracted the attention of the New York Times, which described them as meeting for drinks and renting vacation houses together. But sometimes they were bad: sarcastic, mean, intellectually dishonest, and bullying toward one another. And sometimes they were horrible, behaving like a twisted Greek chorus trying to upstage the main performers. (Years later, as comments on Web sites began to migrate to social media, I would come to realize that they were the main performers.) āThatās sort of the nature of having a commenting community,ā Erin Ryan, an early commenter who became a writer for the site, told me. āPeople start feeling like they should have a say in what happens there. And really thatās not how a publication works.ā At one point, in 2009, I toyed with the idea of handing the site over to the commenters for a day, just to watch them fail.
At times we were accused of ātone-policingā our readers. And itās true: we did tone-police, especially those commenters who were nasty or uncivil. We would take to the comments threads to warn readers about crossing some sort of line. When they derailed a thread, weād ask them to move the discussion into the comments of a daily anything-goes post that I pointedly named āGroupthink.ā (Most of the commenters didnāt seem to get the joke.) I could have, maybe should have, been tougher on them. My managing editor at the time counselled me to think of Jezebel as a virtual dinner party my writers and I were throwing. āYou wouldnāt allow someone to be that rude to other guests or hosts. Youād kick them out,ā he said. āDo the same thing in the comments.ā But we rarely banned anyone outright. No one wanted to punish readers for being impassioned.
I wondered, sometimes, whether my concerns about the comments were themselves sexist. Was I holding women to a standard of comportment? Complicating matters further was the fact that Iād started Jezebel and shepherded it to success on the back of my own anger. Though that anger, as Iāve explained, was legitimate and warrantedāAmerican women had been sold a bill of goods about who they were and what they wanted, or what they should wantāit was starting to define the site, for both readers and casual observers.
ā¦
When writing this, I remembered a 2015 Jezebel piece by Jia Tolentino called āNo Offense.ā In it, Tolentino, who at the time was the deputy editor of the site (and now is a New Yorker staff writer), tries to tackle multiple things at once, including how anger works on the feminist Internet and the ways in which digital media blurs the distinctions between readers and writers, creators and consumers. āThereās a large gap between āthis is badā and āyou should be offendedā that seems to vanish on the internet, and the harder we try to widen it on this website, the more we are constrained by that lingering expectation: that Jezebel exists, as some have always imagined it to, for the infantilizing purpose of telling women when they should get mad,ā she wrote. Later, she added, āIn theory, people still expect a feminist site to tell people what to be offended at; but what people seek from a feminist site is that the site itself will cause offense.ā
Iām not sure that what people seek from a feminist site is that it will cause offense. I think they look for community. But communities can be difficultāchaotic, contentious, cacophonous. I recently came across a two-hundred-plus-page dissertation, published in 2019, called āArchitecture and the Record: Negotiating Feminism in the Jezebel Comments.ā It was . . . a lot. The author, Melissa Forbes, accused the site (again!) of choosing to ācater to outraged feminists.ā I thought that she wasnāt giving the staffers, or our readers, much credit. But I was intrigued by Forbesās observation that the comments provided a corrective to the feminism of the siteās writers. When the writers themselves were glib or cruel, she wrote, the commenters offered āa different kind of feminism from that practiced on the top half of the page.ā I take issue with the idea that there are ādifferent kindsā of feminism, though there are different āwavesā of it. But I do believe that the commentersā close reading of everything we did was how they forged community. They learned from one another, developed relationships, and discovered their own voicesāand that was true even when they were (rightly or wrongly) angry with the editors and writers. As one commenter quoted by Forbes put it, āI have learned a lot from the kinds of articles you publish on this website, and even more from your regular commenters.ā
ā¦
I see Jezebel not as the beginning of the end of the digital-media era but as a momentāa sparkāwithin an ongoing discussion about gender politics. That conversation has led to new realities around sexual assault and harassment, pay inequity, and cultural depictions of women. It also makes some people uncomfortableāin part because it involves women expressing their anger in public and sustained ways. āEvery woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger,ā Audre Lorde wrote in 1981, which can act as a āpowerful source of energy serving progress and change.ā
If thatās part of Jezebelās legacy, Iāll take it. Itās about everything I could have hoped for.
― k3vin k., Monday, 6 November 2023 19:35 (six months ago) link